It is indeed ‘a curious
story’, as the Prologue says. A remote English country house,
an old and faithful housekeeper, two young orphan children and an
eager new governess sent down from London to look after them. But
all is not quite as it seems in the sheltered world of Bly. Spirits
from the past increasingly encroach upon the realm of the living.
And one question keeps worming its way into the governess’s
mind: what exactly did happen between the children, their former
governess and the deceased manservant, Peter Quint?

Britten’s brilliantly
scored, insidiously compelling adaptation of Henry James’s
novella takes its themes of childish innocence and adult
corruption, then twists and turns them to disturbing and ultimately
devastating effect. Jonathan Kent’s eerily unsettling staging
has been recorded at the Glyndebourne Festival conducted by
Glyndebourne on Tour’s Music Director, Jakub
Hrusa.

“Here is
Britten’s supremely crafted operatic masterpiece — not
a dud moment or false move — in a shatteringly powerful
performance of such musical and theatrical distinction that I
scarcely know where to begin apportioning praise.

Perhaps the conductor: I
already knew the quality of Jonathan Kent’s production from
its first outing in 2006, and the cast looked pretty hot on paper
too. But what I hadn’t suspected was that the young Czech
conductor Jakub Hrusa would offer such a thrillingly visceral,
angry and churned-up reading of the score. Galvanising the LPO to
playing of scalding brilliance, Hrusa carefully ratcheted up the
tension in the early scenes and brought the drama to the boil with
an almost daemonic intensity. This wasn’t a nice creepy
bedtime story, but something reaching dangerously into the darker
reaches of human nature.”